The purpose of this monograph was to examine the nature of changes in the system of rights and obligations surrounding employment and the relationship of employer to employee in the United States, Britain, France, and Mexico, with particular emphasis on the property-like rights in employment. In the United States there have been three stages in the objectification of the concept of a job: (1) the period in which the employer-employee relationship was generally conceived as personal, independent of any other such relationship, and characterized by contractual concepts of mutuality and reciprocity, (2) a period in which access to jobs lay under sole control of the employer, and (3) the present period, in which the employer-employee relationship is not linear but complex, and in which both employer and employee have an independent relationship to the job and to families of jobs. "Conflict over the Right to Work in Britain,""France: the Primary Role of Law," and "Job Security in Mexico" compare similar developments in these respective countries. The evidence from these four countries tends to support the conclusion that the classic liberal contractual approach to the employment relation in a complex industrial society is not a viabl e one. (EM)